Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Boards Of Canada To Release 'The Campfire Headphase' Oct. 17, 2005

Many an electronic music fan will want to draw a little smiley-face on the October 17th square of his or her calendar. On that date, Warp Records recording artists Boards of Canada will releaseThe Campfire Headphase, their first album since way back in 2002, when they blessed us with Geogaddi. BoC first rose to prominence in the late-90s with Music Has the Right to Children, a lush, haunting swath of neo-psychedelic, beat-laden ambience that enjoyed utterly universal acclaim (see, for example, this) and spawned a veritable Invid invasion of crass imitators. And since BoC have not, to my knowledge, recorded even one less-than-terrific song, UN Spacy is comfortable predicting that this CD will be quite the humdinger.

But let's get down to brass tacks here. What you want to know - what you need to know - is whether or not this sure-to-be-necessary purchase will further enable your prominently-displayed CD shelves to both impress and aesthetically please. While UN Spacy cannot definitively answer these questions, the evidence available at present is extremely promising. Clearly there's no need to remind readers that the spines of each previous BoC CD were colored a gentle blue - none identical, but all chromatically analogous. (Admittedly, In a Beautiful Place in the Country is a glaring exception to this rule, but it's merely a four-song EP, and can forgivably be laid horizontally on top of the rest of their discography.) The cover image released today does not reveal a spine design, but does feature more than enough cool color to suggest a blue-to-blue-green shelf presentation that, in tandem with other BoC recordings, will readily communicate to discerning guests your formidable appreciation of finer neoclassical electronics. This, it goes without saying, is good news indeed.

UPDATE: Those bastards at Pitchfork just posted their own BoC story, and theirs includes a tracklist (showoffs!).